Living With a Controller

Controllers in the Quiverful movement are no different than those other garden variety self-centered controllers who need to manipulate others. Not all controllers are physically abusive. Many are content to inflict emotional and spiritual damage on others.

If you’re living with a controller, you’ll see your world below:

The following is part of an article by Roger Melton, MA., a psychotherapist in Los Angeles, CA.

Unlike men that can honestly struggle with their own uncertainties and confusions about a relationship, and recognize the part they play in creating problems and conflicts, there are other kinds of men that see love as a game and you as their pawn. In this cruelly covert contest, cunning is their watchword, deception is their fix, and control is their high.

Just as addicts are unrelenting in pursuit of making the next score, these kind of men are unyielding in their hunt for women that they can deceive and manipulate. Unlike emotionally sound men and women, who respect others as much as they do themselves, controlling-men respect no one. To them, people are things. And things can be used.

These “Controllers” use words as deceptive tools. Applying charm’s anesthetic to deaden the pain, they perform emotional-heart-surgery with crude precision. And young women can make the most vulnerable targets for a Controller’s manipulative scalpel.

While the harm most of these men inflict is emotional and psychological, there are those among them with a more dangerous twist, who feed off their victims’ souls the way a leech drains the blood of its prey: drop by drop. These are the captivating vampires, whose devious masks conceal every woman’s worst nightmare-the terrifying face of a future batterer or stalker.

To these violent men, control is like oxygen. Every sign of submission from others is like the breath of life, falsely confirming their delusion that only brute force affirms their worth. Failing to dominate a woman triggers loose a choking fear in these men, which they cannot face. That hidden fear is the truth that threatens their common delusion of godlike invincibility and exposes them as frightened little men, terrified of everyone and everything, including their own guilt. But guilt, for them, is intolerable.

They twist responsibility for their cruel actions away from themselves and lay it onto their victims. Their domineering maneuvers are magically excused in their minds. They project their own selfish, manipulative and deceptive defects of character onto the very people they harm, while persistently and vigorously proclaiming themselves as blameless.

Roger Melton says, “Almost every woman will encounter at least one of these control-obsessed men in her lifetime, whether his method of control is limited to emotional manipulation or extends into physical intimidation.”

If you are living with a controller maybe it’s time to think about how you want to spend the rest of your life.